Quote Originally Posted by Bolivar View Post
You seem to think I was upset because my teammate sucked.
No, I just thought it was a good setup for a mediocre joke.

I'll be clearer. I was upset because my teammate was having more success sprinting and spraying than I was crouching and aiming. When the game you're playing has "Counter-Strike" in the title, this is a reason to delete the game.
Honestly, I've seen few people who were successful running and gunning. It can work at close range obviously since being a foot away kind of trumps weapon spread, but anytime I've been forced to keep moving and fire, I frequently either lose to crouched players with better positioning from a distance, or I unload half a clip to kill one guy who was right in front of me. Run and gun is more viable than it kind of was in the original CS (though I specifically remembering it being possible in some circumstances) but it's still trumped by better positioning, aim, and crouching from a medium-long distance.

And in the end, it doesn't bother me since it means more variety, and this isn't CS 1.6. It's a new game altogether, and while somethings are different, it still plays a lot like a new CS game to me.

Full Disclosure: I'm a 1.6/Condition Zero player. So I definitely am looking for something closer to that.
Also in the interests of full disclosure, I've been playing CS since Beta 3.0 or 3.1 and while I still appreciate the original, I definitely preferred CS:S, even though the irony of treating Source like some sort of bastard step child of the series is that it maintained a lot of issues the original had (especially level design and weapon balance) while the new one actually fixes a lot of that in my eyes.

There was at least one point I agreed with in your post: The MP5 was THE weapon you took when you couldn't afford anything better. Or when you needed to save (more on that later). Or when equipment mattered more than your primary. Or when you were guarding a tighter space, like Short A on dust2. Or when you wanted to skip M4/AK for AWP. Or when you wanted to save to plan ahead. It's the cheapest of the four standard weapons and available to both teams. This is why in the competitive scene, the MP5 is indeed the most commonly used weapon.
The fact that I prefer CS:S to 1.6 and you're the opposite probably lead to some confusion here. The MP5 was borderline useless in CS:S. It was fine if you managed to hit the other person in the head (though even then it sometimes had to happen twice to get through the helmet). Otherwise, it was the weapon you bought when you wanted something pretty accurate that took 5+ shots to kill someone. The Desert Eagle was actually the go to in Source for saving money. In fact, I frequently used it in the place of a primary weapon because it was so good. Even when there were times I could use the M4 or AK instead.

Such as the official absence of some very classic maps that were the pillars of the Counter-Strike experience.
I'd be curious to know which maps you're talking about since as far as I'm concerned, the best maps from my time with 1.6 and Source are all there. Some such as Dust are actually more playable and balanced with the changes which were made than they've ever been.

The lack of silencers. The missing spray paint tags. The lack of darker areas and flashlights/night vision to see in them.
These I don't mind since silencers were kind of unbalanced being available to CT's only, I expect sprays will probably get patched in eventually and I never cared about them that much anyway, and I can't remember many maps where light levels ever came into play. Certainly it wasn't something that mattered in the official maps and carried over to Source. In fact, I specifically remember frequently thinking how useless the flashlight and night vision were in the original CS since it was almost never useful on any map I remember playing.

The requirement of buying ammo in Classic Competitive which was absolutely a HUGE part of the gameplay. All of these issues suggest the game was not given sufficient tender loving care, or respect, that it deserved.
Honestly, I never liked buying ammo. CS has always walked a fine line with having a dangerous slippery slope of successful teams pulling far ahead and having limited money to buy ammo was terrible. There's too much potential there for it to lead to lame duck situations where you can afford guns, but not enough ammo. Especially since the weapons were pretty unbalanced in previous versions leaving very limited numbers of good choices. They actually took that out in Source and I think it's a good thing. It helps to keep the competitive playing field a bit more balanced from round to round since successful teams are already pulling ahead and gaining an advantage anyway.

But why didn't they also make a third or fourth game mode to build upon the classic "cs" and "de"?Dumbing it down can be awesome, but it is tremendously disappointing when a developer makes accessibility a priority while completely ignoring innovation.
That they didn't innovate enough? I'd say making the game of CS even moderately accessible to new players is pretty impressive because I honestly didn't think it'd be possible to do as much as they did. Not sure what else they could have done, especially when the best way to attempt to appease CS fans at all is to literally do absolutely nothing because the majority will hate any attempt at progress good or bad.

And success is obviously at the heart of it here. Counter-Strike was two things: it was the biggest video game in history and it was the most praised competitive platform of all time. Unfortunately, the First Person Shooter genre has dramatically evolved in the about twelve years since CS first came out. Valve can't have both. In the state the game is in now, they would have been much better off having iron sights.
I'll let the statement that it's the biggest game ever and the most successful competitive platform alone for now. I think Starcraft/SC2 probably holds the title for the latter, and I'm not sure how the numbers work out on the former but I'm sure there must be more successful games out there. CS was one of the first online game to have a major competitive scene develop in North America in spite of what I see as some gameplay issues. But the thing is, I don't think multiplayer games have really evolved dramatically over the years. Certainly not in the competitive multiplayer arena anyway. In fact, most are still running around with nothing more than variants of capture the flag, king of the hill, etc. and occasionally they'll add more casual modes ripped from CS mods. The games certainly change mind you, but I really don't think we've come as far as you might think from CS. Many have just fall somewhere on a spectrum between unforgiving games like CS and more arcadey games like TF2 or Quake. Very few games have played at being a serious competitive game while actually adding new and different game mechanics.

I concede that a lot of my issues sound like trivialities, and they may not matter much to you, Vivi, but they matter a great deal to me and millions of fans who are now voicing their criticism of the game. Fans of the modders that created Counter-Strike and the community that facilitated it for so long, not fans of Valve and their repeated attempts to capitalize on it while consistently diluting its gameplay. This may be the third time they've done it under the guise of a new game, but it's the first time they cited rehabilitating the competitive community as the reason for doing it.

They have a lot of work to do.
See, I don't actually think your issues are trivial. I'd be happy to debate with you on the competitive merit of doing things one way or the other, but I'm not going to tell you you're wrong if stuff bothers you. That's totally fair, and I'll actually give you a great deal of credit for at least articulating what it is that you don't like. I may think it's a better competitive game because of the changes, but I do like hearing and discussing competing view points even if I do have strong views on what constitutes good changes which clash with them sometimes. The debate itself is still enjoyable and enlightening, and since I want to make my own games I'm all for it.

But I'll admit right now that I may be a bit jaded whenever I start hearing about the CS community not liking something. Probably because this is the third time I've seen it if you don't count changes from one beta to another. People basically hated 1.6 when it came out and it was a complete pariah amongst 1.5 players who didn't want to use Steam and hated the fairly minor changes being made to it. Of course now it's the only way to play the original and I quite liked it from the start. And when CS:S came out there was much the same reaction. I saw many CS 1.6 players basically say it was terrible and the worst thing imaginable before it even came out and I knew a fair few who never even tried it. But I felt it actually rebalanced the competitive game play quite nicely, and apparently so did thousands of others. Now we've got GO, which I feel is a definite improvement on CS:S and even the original and we're seeing the same reaction from the hardcore faithful all over again. And in fairness, I haven't seen many even attempt to defend their opinion half as well as you have, so I tend to be a bit dismissive of those who don't even bother to try and discuss it on any kind of meaningful level.

But that's not the case with you, and if you want to keep discussing the game I'm more than happy to hear your detailed thoughts on it and what does and doesn't work, and share mine as well.